If you ever get a warning like the one below during a Microsoft Project or P6 to Deltek Cobra 5.0 baseline integration, don’t let it drive you crazy. There’s an easy solution, if you know where to look. The warning usually goes something like this:
[Warning]Finish date for budget resource Engineer (04/25/2012) after finish date of activity 1.2.2.1.6.1 (11/01/2011)
These warnings never show up alone. If you get one of these warnings, you’ll get dozens of them in the log at the end of the integration process. You’ll then spend the next few hours looking at the tasks in the IMS trying to find a resource assignment with the bogus finish date, but you’ll never find it. When this happened to me recently, I tried everything, including saving the project into a Microsoft Access .mdb file, and then opening likely named Access tables to look for the bogus dates. I found nothing.
I eventually learned that this warning is triggered by the presence of resource assignments on unmapped summary tasks directly above mapped tasks. This can happen if the schedulers have been reorganizing the structure and then fail to remove resource assignments from summaries that were previously lower level tasks.
Microsoft Project is particularly vulnerable to this problem, due to the more fluid nature of its task hierarchy and the easy indenting functionality. So, if you ever see a warning similar to this during baseline integration, you’ll know not to waste your time searching, and instead, go directly to the schedulers for resolution.